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 gainst all the pundits'
prognostications, national defense has suddenly become a hot issue in
the 2000 presidential election. Governor George W. Bush and his running
mate, former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, have seized upon evidence
that the Clinton-Gore team will bequeath a hollow military to the next
administration.
For example, candidate Bush cited unready divisions in his acceptance
speech at the GOP convention. Last week, before the annual conclave of
the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he decried the fact that 5,000 troops are
on food stamps and warned about recruiting shortfalls. And, with a comradely
touch of Reagan-style bravado, he urged U.S. servicemen and women to "hold
on" because "help is on the way."
Vice President Gore knows that this is a potentially lethal line of attack.
While poll after poll shows the American people to be relishing the fruits
of peace and prosperity &#$151; and, as a result, assigning low priority
to national security concerns — they are not fools. When apprised
of the fact that the "peace dividend" we have been cashing in for the
past decade or so has left the nation's military in sorry shape, most
of them are alarmed and want corrective action taken.
More to the point, the public tends to regard Republicans as more responsible
on national-security matters. If Bush can succeed in making defense a
prominent feature in his case for taking back the White House, chances
are good that the ensuing debate will redound to his advantage. Not surprisingly,
Gore and his surrogates are trying manfully to lay down suppressing fire.
The day after "W." accepted his party's nomination, Clinton Pentagon press
spokesman Ken Bacon and General Hugh Shelton, the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, were mustered out to dispute the governor's assertion
that two of the Army's divisions were not combat-ready. To be sure, the
Army acknowledged that that had been the case last November but, we are
assured, the problem had been rectified in the intervening months.
Senator Carl Levin — whose role as ranking Democrat on the Senate
Armed Services Committee should not obscure his record as one of Congress's
most assiduously anti-defense legislators — was also trotted out
to denounce this error. In television appearances, he labeled it as "irresponsible,"
going so far as to call it "purple rhetoric" during an appearance on CNN
on Sunday, the senator expressed shock, shock that Gov. Bush would try
to "partisanize" (sic) the condition of the U.S. armed forces.
To show, by contrast, just how bipartisan he was, the Michigan Democrat
extolled the qualities of his former Republican colleague-turned-Secretary
of Defense, William Cohen. Levin repeatedly quoted a bit of Cohen's politicized
hyperbole to the effect that today's military is "the finest, the most
powerful, the best led...in history." He caviled that the number of troops
on food stamps is way down from the Bush years, recruiters are now making
their quotas, and President Clinton has signed into law in 1999 the first
increase in defense spending and pay in many years.
Now, the pundits would have us believe that Bush and Cheney are on the
defensive on defense. In the wake of the Democratic counterattacks, we
are told, Gore has effectively parried Republican criticisms and shown
them to be ill-informed and vacuous. If the GOP ticket will just let it
go at that, the chattering class will be proven to be right that national
security will not be a prominent issue this year after all. Of course,
for the reasons mentioned above, this would be a windfall for the Democrats
and a strategic error of major proportions for the Republicans. George
W. may nonetheless fall for it — as his father did before him in
1992 when Bill Clinton and his Rasputin, James Carville, pronounced that
it was "the economy, stupid," and Bush Sr. effectively allowed the campaign
to be fought on territory and terms of his opponent's choosing.
If like-father-like-son pertains eight years later, it will be only partly
due to the wiliness of George W. Bush's adversaries, who will do and say
anything to reduce their vulnerability to attack on this score. A far
more serious problem is the fact that the Texas governor has left himself
exposed to precisely this sort of smoke-and-mirrors operation because
he has, thus far at least, refused to address himself to the full magnitude
of the problem: It is not only today's military that is facing
severe shortfalls that impinge upon readiness, recruitment, retention,
and morale. An even more acute problem looms with respect to the ability
of tomorrow's armed forces to fight and prevail in future conflicts.
How acute? Two respected experts in the field, Daniel Goure and Jeffrey
Ranney, warned in an authoritative study they published last year that
the nation faces nothing less than a "defense train wreck."
Utilizing the Clinton-Gore administration's own data — developed
in the course of an exhaustive 1997 Pentagon assessment known as the Quadrennial
Defense Review (QDR) — Goure and Ranney conclude that:
The budget shortfall (total dollars required compared with total dollars
budgeted) for Fiscal Years 2001-2005 is estimated to be $573 billion,
or 29 percent. This five-year shortfall is equivalent to almost a year
and a half of annual Defense Department funding. That is, the President's
DoD spending plan for FY 2000-2005 provided only enough financial resources
to pay for three and a half years of the next five years of costs for
fully supporting the QDR force.
Nowhere is this problem more severe than with respect to the funding required
to modernize the armed forces. According to Goure and Ranney: "The acquisition
budget shortfall [for FY 2001-2005] is estimated to be $475 billion and
is expected to account for 86 percent of the overall $573 billion budget
shortfall [for this period]." As a result, even the ships, planes, armored
fighting vehicles and other equipment that the Clinton-Gore administration
deems to be essential to our combat forces' ability to dominate and survive
the battlefields of the future are going substantially unfunded.
Gov. Bush must come to grips with this travesty. To do so, however, he
will have to address it squarely, as candidate Reagan did twenty years
ago — namely, by promising not just to fiddle at the margins (a pay
raise here, a reenlistment bonus there) but to restore the U.S. military
to fighting trim by allocating to it, on a sustained basis, the sorts
of resources that are clearly required to recapitalize as well as to maintain
the force.
If W. is to secure in this area the kind of electoral mandate that Ronald
Reagan enjoyed, however, he is going to have to abandon glib talk about
"skipping a generation" of military hardware. Such a scheme sounds good
to the uninitiated and holds out the false promise of cost-avoidances
that powerfully appeal to politicians who describe themselves as "cheap
hawks."
In practice, however, it is a formula for condemning America's armed forces
to operating obsolete equipment long after its useful service life is
ended — and inviting others to perceive and perhaps to act upon exploitable
weaknesses on the part of the United States. This is the sort of gambit
one expects from Al Gore. It is unworthy of a ticket committed to restoring
to the U.S. military the strength and credibility the nation requires
it to have.
On Sunday, Dick Cheney correctly declared that "Either Al Gore doesn't
know what's going on in the U.S. military, or he's chosen not to tell
the truth about it." If the former Secretary of Defense and his running
mate want to ensure that the same cannot can be said of their ticket,
they must speak the truth about the full magnitude of the problem confronting
America's armed forces.
No less importantly, the Republican ticket must commit itself to the sort
of corrective action that is required. This means ensuring that the country
invests on a sustained basis no less than four cents on the national dollar
— what might be called the Four Percent (of GDP) Solution —
to redress the legacy of the Clinton-Gore years and to prepare America's
military for the challenges of the 21st Century.
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